I had the idea to have a Slack channel, and there would be a bot that watched the General registry, and posted every “New Package” pull request to the slack channel.
I don’t have the time to implement such a bot myself, but it would be very cool if someone were to do so.
I personally prefer a RSS feed. It makes it possible to read the news when we find time. Slack erases the history after some time because we are in a free plan. Also, Slack is noisy.
If someone does end up making this bot, perhaps they could make a single backend with multiple frontends. The frontends would be RSS, Slack, etc. So users could choose their frontend.
Per the poll below JuliaObserver was useful to the community at about 1,000 visits a week.
&& Thanks for your reply Stefan @StefanKarpinski . Understood you have no direct connection with it, but FYI JuliaObserver.com has been down over a week now, and its not clear if anyone is working on it .
Also, All the alternative “work arounds” are extremely cumbersome, way too far down in the weeds for a searchable functional overview of available Julia packages, and so would be very weak substitutes for JuliaObserver.com .
Would you or anyone else on this thread know who to contact, offer help to etc. ?
Yes I am thanks. And I consider pkg.julialang.org a useful resource to dive into the weeds for a particular package after selecting a particular package selected from the list of options I generate from searching JuliaObserver.com ; so IMHO pkg.julialang.org is useful Yes ; but substitute for JuliaObserver.comNo .
Wow, Thats a rather a large question @StefanKarpinski , but Ill try.
One example: KWS: QR decomposition
pkg julialang org Doesnt show the Relationships / Overview Between the Packages,
as in Package fooJK << Requires Package fooAB, and
is >> Used by Package fooLM, fooOP, and fooRS .
Also don’t know the count of Stars from the community that the package is useful, bugfree etc.
Sure you may be able to dig around for a few hours
and rebuild JuliaObserver.com from pkg julialang org ;
but why recreate the wheel yourself when you’ve
already seen it done better before and can "take it all in with one glance at the JO dashboard "
using JuliaObserver.com ?
I have to confess that I never really used JuliaObserver. Since it’s down, I can’t try it now. pkg.julialang.org does include numbers of stars for package, so I’m curious what additional information you’d want there. Showing what other packages a package depends on or is depended on is a pretty clear feature, although I’m somewhat curious what the use case for that is—when do you need to know that? Regarding example code and MWE, is clicking the package tab and seeing the README and docs not sufficient?
What it doesn’t show is a quick summary of which packages have been added or updated - categorized by area. This is where Julia Observer was helpful. IIRC it also showed how many times packages had been downloaded by time period.
Knowing which packages package A depends on, and the reverse, which packages depends on package A, is useful when determining if one wants to depend on A for new packages.
E.g., if package A only depends on well maintained packages and many well used packages depend on A, it is somewhat safe to assume that A will be well maintained. If on the other hand, A depends on obscure packages and no packages depend on A, it’s a more risky move to have a dependency on A.
I think there are two discussions going on in this topic:
how to keep up with information about Julia packages in a more or less organized, convenient, and asynchronous way (ie one can catch up with stuff at intervals, on demand),
using metadata from the registry and Github to form opinions about packages.
(2) is interesting and potentially useful, but my question is about (1).
Sorry for letting Julia Observer go offline for a couple weeks. Got hacked and didn’t have time to set everything back up. The websites back online (without any data), so now I’m running all the workers and hoping it just works™.
As always, if you have any julia observer questions or suggestions, leave a github issue
No worries - ok so honestly, I was a little worried
At any rate, Thank You for your work on JuliaObserver.com
Btw @djsegal you may want to read over his comments in this thread and check with @Tamas_Papp about something like a personalized updateable cookie ( to maintain state) for a “whats news to me” date driven RSS feed function on the News Tab we see here >> https://web.archive.org/web/20190530063341/https://juliaobserver.com/ ;
Alternatively if you are busy message me and we can see about me gathering his functional requirements
and possibly coding it - both/either way is fine.